Evgeny Lebedev: Join me in the square for our Get Reading festival

I’ll let you in on a little secret. When news of Barbara Windsor’s explosive return to London’s most famous square made headlines earlier this week, it wasn’t news to me. The papers failed to mention the biggest secret of all, which I can now exclusively reveal. She will have on her arm a most unlikely new husband. A dirty, foul, smelly old man, who hasn’t washed in years and who hides mouldy old snacks in his great, bristly beard. Reader, it is I.

I refer, of course, to Trafalgar Square, where the Evening Standard’s Get Reading festival takes place tomorrow. Barbara and I, as Roald Dahl’s Mr and Mrs Twit, are, of course, the stars of the show, but we will have one or two others supporting us: Hugh Grant, Lily Cole, Rupert Everett, David Harewood and Warwick Davis. And then there’s the small matter of performances from the casts of War Horse, Wicked, Matilda: The Musical and a lot more besides.

For the past two months I’ve been visiting primary schools all over London, reading stories with children, with a bit of help from Stephen Fry, Harry Enfield and Boris Johnson. This festival will be the high point — but not the end — of a great and important campaign to get children reading.

It’s fun to meet the children but it’s more inspiring to see the impact the campaign is having. One school we visited, St Mary’s in Battersea, was one of the most poorly performing schools in the capital. Only 53 per cent of 11-year-olds were passing their Sats to the required level in English and maths. Within six months of sending a small army of reading volunteers in, and thanks to the hard work of the headteacher Jared Brading and his staff, the rate had risen to 100 per cent in English and maths, and the school is now in the top 10, not just in terms of improvement, but on overall performance.

Meanwhile, Mrs Twit has had to get by on her own quite a bit over the past couple of weeks while I, her bearded beau, have been in Moscow, awaiting the result of my father’s trial. But beyond the relief of Dad avoiding a prison sentence, Moscow meant an opportunity to see Iran’s outgoing president and Washington’s bête noire Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, inset above. Political theatre, I soon discovered, is not limited to Russian courtrooms.

Ahmadinejad was in town to see Vladimir Putin and I had been invited to meet him just before that summit at Moscow’s President Hotel, a one-time Communist Party favourite now most closely associated with hosting visiting Chechens.

When I got there, however, I found to my horror that the room was full with the most cloying of local sycophants, each of whom seemed determined to outdo the others in their praise.

Ahmadinejad, whose two-term tenure comes to a close when his country’s new secular leader takes office next month, was described as uniquely “charismatic”, the head of a country that “no other country in the world compares to”, and as not just a politician but a “poet”.

One locally selected dignitary even went into rhapsodies at how happy he was to be able to gaze upon “your face” and wallow in the “expression of your eyes”. It was nauseating stuff.

To give him credit, Ahmadinejad, who at 5ft 2in is far more diminutive than I had previously realised, seemed initially bemused by the flattery but — as we are all prone to do when so excessively complimented — soon got into the spirit of the occasion.

The questioners were thanked for their “astuteness” and “wisdom” and, when one called for a Eurasian union boosting Russian and Iranian interests that spread from Tehran to the North Pole, he declared that was not far enough. It needed to stretch all the way from San Francisco.

At such a love-in, questions about Syria and Iran’s nuclear programme got little attention, other than Ahmadinejad’s warning that the Western countries “do not want a peaceful situation” in Syria and that Western countries’ attitudes to the Middle East were revealed by how they created safe areas for “Zionists”.

Unable to question him properly, and sick of the brown-nosing, I therefore resorted to a classic British journalistic ruse. Shortly afterwards, I made my excuses and left.

The Iranians have now offered to let me more effectively quiz Ahmadinejad when he undertakes the final foreign visit of his presidency. An invitation has kindly been extended to me to join him on that trip. It is to, of all places, Iraq.

Infectious: Thomas Heatherwick (Picture: Nick Cunard/Rex Features)

Three remarkable men

I always find it really inspiring to meet someone with an infectious passion for what they do, and recently I’ve met three. Thomas Heatherwick the designer of the Olympic cauldron and the new London bus, showed me his plans for London’s garden bridge. A garden across the Thames is in the same spirit as New York’s High Line park, which is rapidly establishing itself as one of that city’s best-loved features. He is keen for all Londoners, as well as readers of the Standard, to get involved in this wonderful project, so expect to hear more in the future.

Another was Fergus Garrett, the head gardener at Great Dixter in West Sussex, perhaps the country’s greatest garden, and a shrine for garden lovers. It was such a joy to see the lilacs, poppies and tree lupins — one of my favourite plants.

The last one, well, I met him quite a while ago actually, but with the Get Reading festival happening tomorrow, I thought I’d mention the Standard’s campaigns editor David Cohen. All the times we’ve been to schools, or around the dispossessed corners of the city, it’s instantly obvious that his belief in these campaigns comes from deep down, and that it is so much more than a job to him. We’re very lucky to have him. He’ll be there tomorrow too, and sporting his preferred goatee, but he’s certainly not a twit.